Intelligence serving the user — not just the printer.
flowchart TB
subgraph M["Printer-centric (manufacturer)"]
MP[Printer] --> MC[(Vendor cloud)]
MT[Proprietary tag] --> MP
MC --> MA[Vendor app]
end
subgraph T["User-centric (TigerSystem)"]
TT[TigerTag chip] --> PH[Any phone]
TT --> RD[Any NFC reader]
TT --> PR[Any printer]
PH & RD --> TC[("Your TigerSystem account — YOURS")]
TC --> ANY["Any app — Studio, Connect, TigerHub, yours"]
end
In a printer-centric world the printer is the center: the tag exists to serve the machine, and the data flows into the manufacturer's silo.
In TigerSystem the user is the center. The user owns:
- the filament — any brand, any vendor;
- the metadata — material, color, print settings, encoded on a chip they control;
- the inventory — stored under their own cloud account, exportable;
- the history — weights, locations, usage over time;
- the synchronization — the same account feeds every app and device.
TigerSystem simply connects every component together.
Manufacturer tags are usually cryptographically locked (see the compatibility section for per-vendor details: UID-derived keys, AES-encrypted sectors, RSA signatures). Locking serves the vendor: it ties consumable purchases to the machine and keeps the data pipeline proprietary. It also means your own spool inventory is not yours.
TigerTag chips take the opposite stance: an open NDEF payload on a standard NTAG chip, documented publicly, with open SDKs to read and write it.
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Related: Universal filament identity, Compatibility